Here is a book to be shared with your closest friends. The Miscreant presents a cast that includes misbehaving young men, squabbling couples, and frustrated lovers, and it occupies a geography that ranges from 1930s India to present-day New York City. Victor is genuinely fond of his characters, from the harried husband in the slapstick “Peter and the Ants,” which turns pest control into a new world war, to the desperate young man in “Loving Ayesha,” a story that weaves secular love, religious ardor, and India’s struggle for freedom from British rule into the book’s most unlikely and affecting centerpiece. It’s a fondness that gives this collection an unusual—and welcome—warmth.

Sumitra Ghosal came all the way from Bankura in West Bengal to join the education service in the recently formed Bundeli State. During the period from 1956 to 1990, spanning more than three decades, she got shunted around small towns and semi-rural areas. The book is woven around her experiences on women teachers’ lives. She found for some teachers, cruel circumstances charting out the unknown trajectory, while for the others, the evil streak already present manifested itself rather blatantly during their teaching careers.

Ranging from weird to quirky, scheming to whimsical, there were all kinds of women for Sumitra to experience and continually learn from. Bearing a religious bent of mind, Sumitra, a spinster by choice, didn’t fail to take cognizance of the bizarre instances of marital co-existence in the couples she met throughout the story.

Devank Dutta, a young and a bright executive, is found murdered, just off the highway, by a group of picnic goers. Two of the best in the Mumbai Crime Branch, ACP Aabhay Roy and ACP Ria Sharma are entrusted with solving this murder case. The news media can’t get enough of this case, the victim being an employee of the real estate behemoth, View Life Realty. While the police at first believe that the murder might have something to do with recent events in the company, new evidence unearthed during the investigation leads them to believe otherwise. There is certainly more to Devank’s death than what meets the eye.

This book, which is a compilation of short and some very short stories, is a reminder for all of us to learn from nature. It is nature that often guides us towards tranquility in times of turbulence. As we all compete in the rat race that our lives have become, it is important to understand that letting go is fine at times. It is okay to relax and accept things the way they are.

This book examines various aspects of human nature in an attempt to decipher if man is capable of finding peace in an otherwise chaotic world. With the help of several anecdotes, the book enumerates the various factors that cause stress, while endeavouring to predict if man can overcome stress and live a relaxed and peaceful life. The characters in each of the stories included in this book grapple with their own problems, and it is nature, even human nature, that gives them the strength to move on. All the stories, at the core, have a Taoist influence.

We all have stories to tell. This one is about me  a person lost both, in the big wide world and in life. I decided to leave my 6-month-old and a caring husband behind and escape. You might wonder why. The train takes me to unknown places, full of strangers and perils. I fall in love, most unusually, in unprecedented circumstances, with unexpected people. It is self-discovery, and enlightening.

The turmoil of fleeing, the strangers, their emotions, the eagerness to master life, the discovery of an inner ego, the dreaded land, the favorable universe against an unfavorable mind  this is what my journey has been about.

Is there an option to return back to the old world or is it too late? Will I return back to where I belong?

A child from the desert lands of Rajputana reaches Calcutta. He remembers nothing of his past and has no inkling of what the future holds. A tree narrates a patch of Delhi’s history. A girl loses her innocence to a tantric. A boy finds himself about to marry a girl he never loved.
A stray dog invades and captures the heart and hearth of an unwilling ‘parent’. Wild mongooses go on a rampage in an army household. A middle aged woman hears Vedic chantings in the croaking of frogs. A crane gives birth to a child.
These and many other stories, long and short, make up the pages of this book - which is really two books. A collection of anecdotes and stories, some approximated from life, others imagined, they are the brain children of two authors: Asha Gangoli, a “retired” army wife and O.N. Shrivastava, a retired police officer and former Governor of Nagaland and Manipur. Together they conjure up a motley of many moods and backdrops, sometimes sprightly, sometimes sad. But always full of a love for life and for nature.

The choice of writers, the themes and the styles represented in this volume tell us something about Srinivas Rayaprol himself, about the mind of the creative writer-cum-translator at work. The selected texts cover a range of themes concerning man-woman relationships, women's desires, the plight of single women, the functioning of bureaucrats and politicians, among others. One cannot miss out on the preoccupation with death in many stories, nor can one ignore the ironic twist in the conclusions of some of them. The choices also seem to suggest an inclination for the unusual, rather than run-of-the-mill stories, both in terms of theme and style. The final selection of the stories seems to be purely personal. The order in which the stories have been presented too seems unique, for it defies chronology.

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